I just got a new retail SOHW-1693S. I've been visiting this site for awhile, and this is my first DVD burner, so I've been trying several different media, running Nero scans and Kprobe. This is the only DVD burner I have, so I've been burning and scanning using the same drive.

Anyway, the reason for my post is that I've noticed that I'm sometimes getting occasional "spikes", to about 100-110+, when I do scans, with both Nero CD/DVD Speed, and with Kprobe.

I've seen some posts indicating that individual spikes are not a problem, but I'm worried because, in my case, I think that these spikes sometimes seem to occur about the same area of the drive (about 1GB+, see the MCC004 and YUDEN scans), and I'm wondering if there might be a problem with this drive.

I'm posting some of my scans below. I've posted some of these in other forums (e.g., the DVD media forum), but thought that it'd make sense to put them all in one place for this topic (I guess I can only upload 5 images at a time, so I'll try post the remaining in a reply in a bit.).

All of these disks were created using Nero "Create Data Disc", except for the last set, CMC MAG M01, which was a copy of a DVD movie that I made with DVDShrink/Nero, and coincidentally, that scan that doesn't seem to exhibit the "spike" at about 1GB+, but does show a spike between 3GB & 3.5GB.

Jim

P.S. Sorry, I can't figure out how to intersperse text with the images below, but the scans are:

It seems, as you all surmised, that scanning @ 4x got rid of the spikes on all these scans, but this SOHW-1693S doesn't seem to like scanning the MCC004 media @ 4x.

FYI, I mainly am interested in using the burner to backup files, rather than making copies of music and/or movies. Given the above scans, any conclusions about this particular drive and/or which media to go with?

@ jimcplI would suggest staying with the YUDEN00T02 discs, tho that was a pretty nice 16x burn with the cmcmagm01's. You can also right-click on your PI Kprobe graph ans select 'auto Y-axis' and the graph will be only as high as your highest PI

Thanks for the comment and the suggestion re. Kprobe. I'm still kind of puzzled about the MCC004 scans though. Going to the 4x scans definitely seemed to have eliminated the "single" spikes, but I'm wondering why did the MCC004 scans of the 16x burn get SO bad?

Also, for my own edification, and for future, should I do all scans that I post here at 4x? As I mentioned, it seems like a lot of the scans in the "DVD media" forums are at 8x, and thus I assumed that was the preferred scan speed.

@ jimcplyup GoRm has it right...the 5x/8x scans are for different drives...the ones that aren't privileged enough to use Kprobe:). I personally think a 4x kprobe scan is more 'accurate' than the others' at the higher speeds, but it does take longer...so use the 4x kprobe scans for here.

Without writing a book, the reason your MCC004 were ugly at 8x is because the scan is going faster and the standards are 'looser' than at 4x...an 8x scan can have PIF up to 32 versus 4max for 4x scan PIF. Similar with the PI's. Those 004's definitely have some high PI totals, but reading at a slower speed, your drive was able to correct errors that weren't correctable at 8x. You can read Interpreting PI/PO error scans for a more indepth discussion as I haven't been very clear here...

1) Re. my original question, it appears that the spikes that I was originally worried about are not due a problem with this drive, but probably due to my doing the Nero and Kprobe scans at 8x, rather than 4x.

2) With this drive, I should (preferably) stick with the YUDEN000T02 media (at 8x), or possibly the CMCMAGM01 (@16x).

FYI, the YUDEN000T02 was from a 100-pk of Fujifilm (Japan) 8x DVD+R from Bestbuy. The CMCMAGM01 was from a 50-pk of Memorex 16x DVD+R. The MCC004 was from a 25-pk of Verbatim 16x DVD+R.

@ jimcplYup that sounds about right.You could try the M01's at 12x or 8x and see what happens...if they are as good or better than the T02's then you've got another way to go.

You're right about the scan speeds as well...4x scan speed is a CLV strat and the 8x scan speed is a CAV strat...I think that CAV strat has an adverse effect on the scan. 4x is also a compromise between the fastest/least accurate( 8x+) or the slowest/most accurate(1x)